{"id":1308,"date":"2012-03-04T12:35:23","date_gmt":"2012-03-04T12:35:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=1308"},"modified":"2012-03-04T12:35:23","modified_gmt":"2012-03-04T12:35:23","slug":"the-x-axis-4-march-2012","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=1308","title":{"rendered":"The X-Axis – 4 March 2012"},"content":{"rendered":"

Well, this won’t take long, will it? \u00a0After a veritable flood of X-books last week, this time we’ve got just the one – Astonishing X-Men<\/em>\u00a0#47<\/strong>. \u00a0And since I’m kind of busy this weekend, let’s just do that one and be done with it.<\/p>\n

This is the final part of Greg Pak and Mike McKone’s alternate-reality storyline “Exalted”. \u00a0Just to bring you back up to speed: Cyclops has been kidnapped by the X-Men of a parallel world, along with a bunch of other Exiles-style X-Men counterparts. \u00a0It turns out that this world was permanently damaged in a final battle between the X-Men and Magneto. \u00a0In order to keep it going, they have a giant plot device – sorry, very important machine – which powers itself by absorbing the energy of mutants. \u00a0In other words, to keep the world going, they have to keep chucking mutants onto the fire. \u00a0All of the suitable local mutants having nobly sacrificed themselves already, they’ve started importing from parallel worlds. \u00a0Because, after all, the X-Men are, in every world, heroes, and will therefore be thrilled at the opportunity to sacrifice themselves for the greater good.<\/p>\n

McKone’s art on this storyline is lovely. \u00a0He’s always a solid traditional superhero artist, but here he’s also contributing some nicely-judged redesigns of the X-Men, all firmly recognisable (frankly, more than you can say for some artists drawing the real versions) but selling the differences without hammering it too much. \u00a0The schoolboy version of Nightcrawler is a particularly nice one, but there are plenty of good throwaways among the flashbacks setting up the world.<\/p>\n

A challenge for writers on the secondary X-Men titles is to figure out what you can actually do with something like Schism when the real storyline is being driven elsewhere, in Uncanny <\/em>and Wolverine and the X-Men<\/em>. \u00a0In this storyline, Greg Pak is taking the oblique approach, by doing a story that tries to address the idea that all the variant X-Men ultimately have something in common, and that this puts the schism with Wolverine’s team into perspective.<\/p>\n

My initial reaction on reading this issue was that Pak had tied it all together pretty neatly. \u00a0The climax is that Cyclops simply refuses to lay down his life for somebody else’s world – becoming the first Cyclops ever to do so, and leaving everyone else baffled at how any version of Cyclops could have gone so far off model as ours. \u00a0This leads the bad guys to conclude that they’ve stumbled upon a diseased world which can usefully be sacrificed to cure their planet once and for all, and of course the big fight ensues. \u00a0There’s a really strong central idea in there, about testing whether “our” Cyclops has drifted so far from his original character that he’s become unrecognisable. \u00a0On that level, it’s one of the strongest Cyclops stories we’ve had in quite a while.<\/p>\n

But that said, the more I think about this story, the more I find that it doesn’t quite hold together. \u00a0There’s a cop-out at the end, where (having defeated the bad guys) Cyclops does offer to stay and sacrifice himself to save their world, only to be forcibly sent home before he gets the chance. \u00a0I’d have preferred to leave it a little ambiguous. \u00a0More fundamentally, though, the story only really works if you accept that Cyclops’ refusal is genuinely unexpected. \u00a0But in fact, the only other prisoners we see are equally uncooperative, and Savior’s whole “police state” set-up rather implies that Cyclops is far from the first one to raise strenuous objections. \u00a0If Savior genuinely thinks that Cyclops will nobly accept his fate, why doesn’t he just explain everything clearly at the outset? \u00a0None of these are plot problems as such – they’re easily reconciled by saying that Savior’s simply wrong about Cyclops being such an anomaly. \u00a0But it’s kind of thematically important that Savior should be telling the truth, I think.<\/p>\n

Still, considering that it’s a four-issue throwaway arc, it’s an interesting one, and a clever attempt to approach the books’ current direction from an entirely different angle.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Well, this won’t take long, will it? \u00a0After a veritable flood of X-books last week, this time we’ve got just the one – Astonishing X-Men\u00a0#47. \u00a0And since I’m kind of busy this weekend, let’s just do that one and be done with it. This is the final part of Greg Pak and Mike McKone’s alternate-reality […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1308","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-x-axis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1308","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1308"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1308\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1309,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1308\/revisions\/1309"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1308"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1308"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}